Ayako Kato decided to stop dancing at the age of 19, after 15 years of ballet training in her native Japan. “I wanted to be prima ballerina,” she says. “But you must win in competitions or that pathway is shut.” She thought, “If I cannot be useful as dancer, I should quit.” So she got a degree in international studies, married, and moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where her husband studied economics at the University of Michigan. Divorced from him since 2000, she says she “tried to be normal Japanese wife.”
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While in Ann Arbor, at 26, she began taking modern classes. Realizing that “it may not be too late to dance,” she enrolled at the U. of M. and earned an MFA. Now 41, she’s not only still dancing but runs a performance company called Art Union Humanscape with her current husband, bassist Jason Roebke, and a monthly performance series, the Epiphany Dance Experiment, at the landmark Epiphany Episcopal Church. A small woman with a gentle, self-effacing manner, Kato has become a powerful performer and, in the five years since she came here to marry Roebke, a force in the Chicago dance community.
Kato vividly recalls her first class with butoh master Kazuo Ohno, whose approach she describes as “more cheerful, more mellow, more hopeful” than that of his provocative mentor, butoh originator Hijikata Tatsumi. At the class, she says, “We were asked to do jellyfish for two hours. Ohno went to New Guinea as soldier, and on the way back he sent out the coffin of a dead soldier to the sea. He said that man’s spirit became jellyfish.” She adds, “Your body is not always yours. It can expand to a role beyond yourself.”
9/6, 10/4, and 11/1 (Kato performs), Epiphany Epicopal Church, 201 S. Ashland, 312-243-4242, $10-$12.
Kato will also be at the Other Dance Festival, 10/1-10/2; Link’s Hall’s 30th anniversary celebration, 10/3; and with the Moving Architects 10/16-18.
